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Co-Production with families with special educational needs and disabilities

Background

Need

Due to family feedback and peer reviews, the Children services in Ealing Council needed to improve co-production at an indivdual, service and strategic level, working towards an aligned co-production approach.

Role

Leading delivery and design elements of the project as part of a mulitdisciplinary team.

Users

Families with children aged 0 - 25 yrs in Ealing who experience additional or special educational needs and disabilities (SEND).

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Timeline

April- May 25: From discussins with senior leaders, co-production emerged as an area of need

June 25: Work scoped and MDT created

July 25: Relationships built with stakeholders and desk research

Aug 25: Workshops with youg people to create a video explaining co-production

Sept 25: Co-production workshops with parents, partners and council staff

Sept-Dec 25: Testing the created approaches in specific services to iterate and improve

Design Process

Empathise

  • Building relationships with Service Director, Leads and partners to undertand needs for co-production

  • Strategic alignment and scoping work 

  • Gathering data on family needs with SEND such as joint straetgic needs assessments (JSNAs), peer reviews and co-produced reports.

  • Desk and literature review of past co-production approaches and activities across the system

  • Creating archetypes of SEND families and needs

Define

  • Bringing data together to create an overview of work to date that can be shared with groups to form a new definiton of co-production and approach

Ideate

  • Co-facilitatied workshops with young people with SEND to explore what co-production looks like to them, and develop together a video resource to guide practitioners

  • Reflecting on sessions with young people, including care leavers to create a set of principles, definitions and approaches on what it takes to do excellent co-production 

  • Synthesising the outputs from working young people into a set of hypotheses that can be tested.

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Prototype

  • Turning co-production principles, definitions and approaches into training, and testing with different teams at different levels of design:

    • Indivdual ​

    • Service

    • Strategic

Iterate 

  • Take learnings from prototypes and bring to other parts of the Children's service area for continued tweaking to ensure the outcome is appropriate for all customer auidences.

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